1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and related device for sharing information, and more particularly to a method and related device for sharing television channel information with categorized communities.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Satellite, broadcasting and cable television (TV) systems are media content delivery systems that can provide plenty of TV, radio and other media channels for a user. With advanced communications technologies, the user can receive programs scheduled on those channels with various client equipments, such as a TV set including a set top box, a personal computer (PC), or a mobile phone.
In a satellite TV system, the client equipment needs to tune to different transponder numbers provided by the satellite. This procedure is so called “channel scanning.” After that, related program identities (PIDs) are found and wrote into a file, which is commonly a channel list. However, most channels are not transmitted at any time. Furthermore, channel allocation on frequency bands may be changed due to the sharing of the bandwidth. Scanning channel frequently can resolve the abovementioned problem but becomes burdensome to users. For example, there are generally hundreds, even thousands, channels within European broadcasting system. Scan through those European channels can take tens minutes, frustrating the users who prefer spending time on channel surfing rather than on channel scanning.
In addition, several channels might be missed during channel scanning due to signal decay or weather effect. This causes incomplete channel list, thereby wasting time on the scanning for the users.
Besides, interactive TV functions have been deployed with various interfaces. For example, an Internet electronic program guide (EPG) is an interactive program guide that allows program information and information about a particular type of media to be displayed on the client equipments. The user can download the EPG from an EPG server via Internet Protocol (IP) and import it into the client equipment. An EPG related to a satellite may include transponder numbers, channel frequency, channel name, brief description and other entries. The user can navigate around the EPG, sort the listings, or select a specific channel to watch. In general, the EPG is maintained by the service provider, updated regularly to notify of channel changes including new added channels, deleted channels, change of the channel sort or the channel frequency and so on. The EPG update mechanism only depended on the service provider is inefficient.
Although provision of the Internet EPG eliminates inconvenience of the frequent, time-consuming channel scanning, asynchronous update between the EPG and the channel changes might be a mapping problem that all of the channels displayed on the EPG do not exactly match the channels allocated on the frequency band.